Newspapers go through three basic stages before reaching the consumer. These stages are commonly referred to as the press room stage, the mailroom stage, and the circulation stage. During the press room or printing stage, the newspapers are printed, cut and folded into complete papers at very high speeds. Typically the papers travel from the press stage to the mailroom stage as a high-speed stream of partially overlapped newspapers.
Since the uninterrupted operation of the printing press is of premium importance, there may be additional equipment, for instance, between the pressroom and mailroom stage to provide a buffer between the two. For example, if the stacking and bundling equipment stopped operating, the printing press could continue to operate provided that the stream of papers could be diverted to a buffer. Heretofore, the buffer system included a helical ramp with vertical shaft. The succession of newspapers was caused to run up the ramp. This was problematic because the newspapers would slide and turn resulting in ink becoming smudged and papers becoming creased.
Another buffer system comprises a drum onto which papers are rolled with the aid of a strap. This system was disadvantageous in that it only provided minimal storage capacity and required a large amount of floor space.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,018,618 discusses a system that requires significantly less floor space than the operating space required for the drum. This system comprises a vertically rising shelf unit that straddles the conveyed stream of newspapers and engages the outside edges of the newspapers. This shelf unit lifts the papers vertically and holds them in storage. The unit requires an upstream device to divide the succession of newspapers into longitudinal sections so that stacks of newspapers can be positioned on each shelf.
Once the papers arrive at the mailroom stage, either directly or from an intermediate storage device, the newspapers are arranged in stacks and bundled for distribution to various locations. The stacking and bundling operation is an expensive procedure that employs complex equipment. The bundles may be stacked in either fixed quantities for general distribution or in selected quantities for distribution to a particular distribution point. The variable size of these bundles complicates the bundling operation because the bundling machines must be able to accommodate the different bundles, and the stacking operation because the differently sized bundles will result in stacks of different sizes. The need to individually track each of the unique bundles complicates the circulation stage as well.
Complete bundles are delivered from the mailroom facility to the circulation stage by a conveyor or a cart or a similar transportation device. Typically, the bundles are taken to trucks, manually removed from the conveyor or cart, and loaded into the cargo space on the truck. This manual loading operation is slow and tedious, taking 45 minutes to an hour to fill a average truck. Because of the labor-intensive nature of this activity, the circulation stage adds significantly to the cost of newspaper printing and distribution.
In order to address this industry problem, systems were developed to automate the circulation stage. Such systems comprise loading carts and automatic cart loaders, such as those described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,181,820 and 5,437,537, that were used to receive bundles from the mailroom and place bundles into the carts. The carts were then manually wheeled into the cargo space of the truck. The carts were dimensioned so as to make the most economic use of the total cargo space volume. When the trucks reached their destination the carts were removed from the cargo space and unloaded.
Although automated systems help make better use of the cargo space and reduce some of the manual operations, these systems still involve the manual loading and unloading and do nothing to simplify the stacking and bundling operation in the mailroom stage. Furthermore, the newspapers were still in stacked bundles when delivered to retailers, door-to-door delivery people, and honor boxes. This meant that either 1) individual bundles of predetermined quantities of newspapers had to be prepared, individually tracked through the circulation stage, and delivered to a distribution point, or 2) the bundles had to be broken apart and separated at the distribution point in order to provide the required number of newspapers. In addition, many attempts have been made to provide a buffer for receiving the output of a printing press when problems occur downstream from the press, but these solutions have been expensive, and generally ineffective. It would therefore be desirable to provide a storage device for holding newspapers and the like that could be used as a component in a buffer system or that was movable and could be transported to delivery locations.